


some saw the sun, some saw the smoke

by openmouthwideeye



Series: The Imp's Wife [5]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Mentions of Jaime/Cersei
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:30:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openmouthwideeye/pseuds/openmouthwideeye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some wars are fought with simple words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	some saw the sun, some saw the smoke

**Author's Note:**

> Jaime speaks! He's been laughing at me through closed lips for ages now, but he had a lot to say, as it turns out. This is half again as long as any of my other installments. What can I say, I've been itching to write something set in Westeros.
> 
> *Title taken from the imminent Coldplay song "Atlas" which I'm pretty sure is going to be an awesome song for our duo. Just sayin.

The first time Jaime saw his daughter again, he thought, _How long before she, too, pays the price of Aerys’ revenge?_

Joffrey was long since ash, burned by his own hellish rule and the peasant’s uprising that scorched the sept.

Tommen was mad with grief and terror. The sweet boy that he was retreated further each day, leaving a shell in his place. Without his mother’s sharp pinches and cutting instruction, Tommen escaped into himself as the Small Council ran amok. Westeros would not bear him long, and Jaime could not help but bitterly rue his one attempt at being a father.

 _Go away inside_.

Tommen had. It would be the death of him, but the smiling boy-king had fled the world. When blade or noose took him, he would not know it.

The Sand Snakes had given his daughter different advice, harder advice. She did not waver before him, nor coil beneath the weight of expectation and disappear beneath her grass-hued eyes.

“I will be Queen,” she announced, softly and simply, when Jaime had caught her party navigating neglected corners of the Red Keep. “And Trystane will be my King.”

Her wording did not escape him. Her quick exchange of glances with the Princess Arianne only confirmed Jaime’s suspicions.

 _I sat upon the throne and waited_ , he thought bitterly. _Waited for my seed to spill upon it._

Myrcella had been a quiet girl, that much he remembered. Tommen had been sweet and Joffrey had been cruel and Myrcella had been quiet.

“Uncle. Will you let me pass?”

He was unprepared for the steel undercutting her courtesies, the perceptiveness in her clear, green eyes. Intuition she had before, kept well hid. The steel was forged in Dorne.

Jaime danced his fingers along his hilt, feigning all the things that the gods had hacked away with his hand.

Tommen was sequestered in his quarters, avoiding the sharp edge of the throne while a squabbling gaggle that called themselves his council envisaged schemes to depose him. Brienne would be guarding the boy, like as not. She trusted Jaime’s sworn brothers nearly as well as he did, and he trusted her with all that they lacked.

He drew words in his weapon’s stead.

“So you may follow your uncles in kingslaying and kinslaying?”

Myrcella raised her chin, baring a garish scar that raked across her cheek and swept away her ear.

The fluency of his heart threw Brienne before him in her stead. He’d long since memorized the hollow of her cheek, livid and enflamed against winter’s whipping wind. He knew the roughness of it against his stump, the smooth ridges under his fingers.

Myrcella did not hide behind her hair as Brienne did, but the steel in her spine was the same. Her Lannister eyes flashed determination as bright and beautiful as his sister’s, but the words that left her red bow lips could never have been Cersei’s.

“I will claim what is mine,” she whispered fiercely. “I _will_ heal the realm.”

Sand Snakes twined about her, ready to strike.

 _I have made kings and unmade them_ , he remembered telling Brienne once.

_Perhaps its time I made Queens as well._

Jaime slid his sword from its scabbard, and Dornishwomen shadowed him down the hall.

*****

Brienne sat upon a simple wooden stool, discomfited by the three black kittens clambering atop her boots and batting the wool of her breeches. When he pushed through the servant’s door with a whisper of wood on stone, she was on her feet, a diminutive beast clinging angrily to her calf as she dislodged its siblings, drawing Oathkeeper.

“Jaime.”

He knew it was passing odd that he traveled through the servants’ corridors. He had felt like some foolhardy lover as they wound their way up the narrow stone passageways. A notion he remembered all too well.

Brienne’s eyes darted past her drawn blade to her knees, where Tommen’s round arms had twined about her to scoop up the tomcat hissing at the soft moleskin of her breeches.

“Have you found trouble?”

“No.”

Her sword lowered at his word, defenses broken as easily as that. Then the Sand Snakes slid into view, and Oathkeeper leapt to guard Tommen as though her grip had never slackened. Spears danced in nimble fingers, a dangerous counterstroke to the rippling Valyrian steel in Brienne’s implacable hand.

Myrcella pushed past them all.

Brienne’s sword arm wavered. There was no denying Cersei in his daughter’s face.

“Brienne.” Jaime felt as though he danced about the gallows, dragons circling overhead as a second noose feathered the scar enclosing Brienne’s neck. His sister’s body already swung.

Brienne absorbed the flushed wetness of Myrcella’s cheek, the appeal Jaime conveyed through the silence. She lowered her sword and edged away, slowly so that Tommen might disentangle himself from the cat clawing her boots.

Jaime felt as though the pricking slivers of the creature’s claws had sunk their grip into his chest.

He eased the door closed behind Tyene and latched it.

“Tommen.” Myrcella fell to her knees beside him, silken skirts pooling like ripples of heat upon the stone. Her hand came up, and Tommen jerked around.

Brienne’s grip twisted on Oathkeeper’s hilt as surely as hope must twist her heart. It reminded Jaime of days scarcely past: tangled in snow and fur, sapphire eyes alight with anticipation and uncertainty, enthralling him past all reason.

But Tommen’s face only drifted into a childish smile, and Jaime saw hope bleed beneath pale, fluttering lashes.

“Myrce.” Her hand fell upon his hair, and Tommen lifted the liberated feline. “This is Ser Pounce. Lady Whiskers likes to steal his mice.”

“Perhaps she handles them better than he.” His daughter’s throat was thick, and Jaime’s own clenched.

Brienne understood then. She turned to him with wide eyes.

Relief shuttered through him, coarse and inescapable, when he saw no betrayal there. He edged through shadows to meet her, stepping lightly around Dornish spears that felt like to prick his spine for all that he’d tossed his lot in with theirs.

She did not speak as she pressed her hip against his, both hands on the blade between his children and Myrcella’s guard.

“It is my right,” Myrcella murmured, watching Tommen babble beneath his breath to the only charges he would claim. She soothed sandy curls from her brother’s brow, but he did not seem to feel it. “The weight was never yours to bear.”

He made no objection as his sister tugged the crown from atop his head, leaving only the golden halo they shared. He had forgotten her altogether.

“I will protect him as I have before,” Brienne announced softly, watching Myrcella rise. The Sand Snakes flowed around her as if bound by unseen tethers.

“My lady?” he murmured, aware that those sun-kissed ears were more attentive than they seemed.

“And you will protect her.”

One hand left Oathkeeper’s hilt; she twisted her sword hand to adjust to the weight of it. Her other found Jaime’s false hand, the only one at her disposal. He cursed the gold, desperate for the feel of her battered skin on his.

“Casterly Rock is surrounded by enemies.”

“I might slip unnoticed into Tarth.”

She knew as well as he the mercenary bands that ravaged her home. Her voice was stupidly stubborn against the likelihood of her failure.

“Dorne.” Myrcella pulled his attention. He had not thought she would interject. “He will be safe in Dorne.”

“Dorne,” Brienne repeated, the name tense on her tongue. Jaime remembered her lips, leeched of warmth by the hoary greed of the Vale until he swallowed them so he would not see death there.

Had winter’s tendrils snaked to Sunspear?

Brienne caught his wrist as she went, a fleeting touch she might have found too bold, once. He longed to gather her in his arms, to dangle her over the chasm that was opening in him at the thought of their parting.

But she was gathering squirming kittens to her, guiding Jaime’s son to his feet while his daughter looked on, and Jaime found himself bound by a duty he’d never known.

Her eyes caught his fiercely as she went, as intelligible to him as parchment and ink. _I will save him. I will return._ And there, burrowed deep under flecks of ice in her eyes, the fire he could not help but seek: _I will miss you._

“Ser.”

Myrcella gave no quarter. Jaime turned to her, but his eyes followed Brienne and Tommen as they went.

“You are Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Ser.”

And then Brienne had gone. He was not like to see her again.

Jaime drew a smile, wry and cutting so he would not tremble. “So they tell me.”

“Defend your daughter’s throne.”

Jaime did not have it in him to be surprised. The command closed, supple and inexorable. Cersei was alive once more, compelling him from a young queen’s face. She had trapped him with her quiet earnestness, his twin’s boldness, the scar that pulled in tandem with Brienne’s—hoarse whispers of _endure_ and _withstand_.

Jaime had spent a lifetime choosing love. He had not thought til now that he must choose between love.

“You know what you ask?”

Jaime saw his fate in the incline of her head, scarce enough that it did not rustle her curls. Myrcella had borne the politic of others and risen as implacable as the Dornish sun. Green eyes had once danced freely, but war and wisdom and folly trapped the color in bindings of gold.

His eyes, set in a young woman’s face.

_My duty is here._

He nodded, terse.

The weight of his golden hand seemed insurmountable; it dragged his stump until it caught on his scabbard and held. If he drew back into his thoughts, it might feel like a heavy, freckled hand raking clumsy caresses between linen and fur. Her heat lingered, trapped in the gold as if etched in its design.

_To choose Brienne would be to lose her._

He took a knee and the weight of obligation pressed upon him, muffling his thoughts like snow smothered sound. He had never rested easy beneath the cloak, but it dogged him like a ghost, chanting _vows_ and _honor_ in a painful, rasping voice.

His voice was as hoarse as hers when he offered what was left of his soul.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback is greatly appreciated.


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